Inquiry Writing Focus - Reflection Weeks 4, 5, and 6

It has been a few weeks since i reflected on how this has been going unfortunately, time has flown by so quickly in recent weeks and i just haven’t had the chance to sit down and reflect on how my inquiry is going!  Will try and make up for this now.

Our writing programme is ticking along nicely, with our focus still being on ‘Exposition Writing.’  We have completed a second piece of writing.  The student’s first looked at an exemplar of writing on the topic ‘Kids Should be Kids’.  I then got the students to argue against this idea.  We use the ideas the author had used but did the reverse. The focus for this exposition was to include at least one rhetorical question, and to use time and text connectives.  This was pretty successful, and the students we able to do most of the planning themselves using the planning template that we used from the exemplar previously.  The only thing they are still struggling with is being able to come up with two reasons to back up their originally opinion statement.  Hopefully this will come with more practise, as I eventually want them to be able to do this themselves without me needing to spoon feed them ideas, or having to get the ideas from their classmates sharing.  We will be self assess our writing on Monday and i will give these students feedback on their completed writing.

This week the whole class will be rotating around 4 different arguments writing ideas for and against each argument as they go.  Then the class, including the inquiry group, will select the argument that most interests them to write their next exposition on.  Im hoping that this time around, the inquiry group won’t need to meet with me for as much time to create their plans, as they should have a wealth of ideas in which to use to create their plans.  The focus for the writing will be to ensure there are two clear reasons for each of our topic paragraph sentences.

Overall, i think this writing unit is going well.  The inquiry group seems to find this factual writing topic a lot easier to achieve the goal of ‘adding extra depth and detail’, and the improvement in the girls writing is greater.  When i reflect on why this is it could be because they don’t have to use their imagination as much as they had to with narrative writing.  Exposition is based on your opinion of a topic and your reasons for thinking this.